"The fires, General," he croaked. Xenophon looked at the man, puzzled. "One day out, no more, for a man with healthy legs-thousands of fires in the hills. The Armenians-they're massing."

The other two men nodded in silence, and I shuddered. The wretched creatures had been staggering through the snow lame and frozen for days, surrounded by the sight of thousands of comforting campfires built to warm the asses of the enemy troops forming up in the hills, while unable to build their own tiny flame for fear of giving away their position. Xenophon helped the men drink a cup of wine, to warm their hearts and deaden their pain and fear of death, then wandered away thoughtfully.

"We can't stay here, Theo," he finally said in dismay. "Tiribazus has taken a lesson from Tissaphernes-he's breaking his truce and hoping to kill us in our beds. It's not safe for the army to be dispersed among the villages while the enemy masses on the heights."

I looked at the snow-covered hills, forage for the animals buried under two yards of white stuff, the troops ill-prepared to travel through the bitter cold. "How can you even think of marching the men under these conditions?" I asked. "Can't you see us, days hence? An army of ten thousand, crawling through the snow like poor Syphion, but without a warm village ahead of us at which we could hope to receive shelter."

He refused to meet my gaze. "We are divided among five villages, miles apart. We could never defend ourselves under these conditions. Better a chance of escape into the mountains, than certain death here in our beds."

He ordered the men to pack that very day and the army left the next morning, two hours before dawn, before the Armenians, whose campfires in the hills even our local scouts could now see on their nightly rounds, realized that we were departing. Some of the men, out of sheer malice and disregard for orders, burnt the huts they were leaving behind, and Xenophon ordered the scoundrels to be committed to baggage detail for an entire month as punishment. The skies cleared during the day and the men's hopes rose that the winter cold might lift for a time, and afford us proper traveling weather. This was in vain, however, for during the entire day we were scarcely able to lurch six miles through the deep drifts. That night, as we huddled under our blankets and improvised shelters of branches and wagons, a driving snow fell upon us, a snow that rose to the tops of the cart wheels, dousing our fires, collapsing our tents and covering the weapons and the men lying near them.

In the freezing, blinding storm, I picked my way carefully through the drifts to the Rhodian camp, or what I could find of it. Through a series of grunted questions and answers, I was able to make out Asteria's lodging-a shallow hollow against a large, rotten stump, not apart from the other troops this time, but rather shared with three or four exhausted, shivering boys. I wordlessly squeezed in beside her, surprised to hear no complaint from the Rhodian next to her about my clumsy jostling, until on a sudden impulse I touched his face and found he was dead. Horrified, I dragged the stiffened body a few feet away and laid it for protection in a deep drift. I then returned and mounded a low wall of snow around us all, as a desperate shelter from the roaring wind, checked the faces of the other Rhodians to be sure they were only sleeping and not expired as well, and nestled Asteria's shivering body against mine under the thin blanket. Though she made no effort to assist me, possibly still angry at my harsh words of several days earlier, neither did she protest. I pulled the blanket tighter, and watched the snow fall around and over us, and set myself to survive the endless night.

Even with the dim light of morning, the soldiers were too numb to rouse themselves to remove the snow's weight, having only enough energy left to clear out a pocket of air in front of their faces so as not to suffocate. They became somnolent in their cold cocoons. In their bleary-eyed moments of wakefulness they had no idea how much time had passed since they were last awake-whether an hour, a night or the entire past day. The water in their leather canteens was frozen as solid as their minds, and the silence, both without and within, was at the same time comforting and deadly. We began to think that it had always been winter and that we could feel nothing else, just a vague awareness of the passage of time, like a lost childhood phrase that surfaces occasionally in one's speech, or the indistinct tingling of a limb long removed. The entire universe had collapsed in on itself to this tiny, white, dreary place, asleep, infinitely cold, unspeakably far from home.

Many of the pack animals, weakened already from lack of food and water, simply lay down and died-they were found later frozen solid as stones, their eyes open and sightless, their hides too hard even to be flayed for the leather. The men found that as long as they remained still beneath their burden of snow and did not try to shake it off, they could retain enough body heat to survive for a time, the entire night if necessary. Xenophon could not give in to this luxury, however, and finally, just after the gray dawn the next morning, he stood up and shook off the snow. I had already crawled out of my own burrow and was waiting for him, shivering in the semi-shelter of the overhanging boughs of a large fir tree. As I stepped forward, he greeted me with a grim, silent nod, and then we walked around camp to view the remains of our army.

The sight was eerie, and frightening. "This doesn't even look like the same country we saw last night, Xenophon," I whispered in awe. "Have the gods carried us away?"

He, too, looked about him with eyes wide in amazement, then swallowed and licked his cracked lips. "Don't think such things, Theo," he said. "Or if you do, don't speak them."

The entire landscape had changed under the effect of the snow, which was still falling heavily, obscuring all but the hundred feet or so we could see around us. Not a sign of life was visible; not the slightest curl of smoke from an untended fire, not a single snuffle from a horse, not a whisper from the usually profanely joking and singing soldiers. Just the smooth flatness of the frozen riverbed on which we were camped, with soft mounds of boulders under the snow scattered randomly about the gravel flats. All was utterly silent and still, save for the soft plopping sound made by an occasional handful of snow sliding off the branches above. The thought occurred to me that the army had left in the night, forgetting to wake us, or that the enemy had attacked after all, killing all but us fortunate or wretched few who had lain unawares beneath the silent blanket of snow. My spirit said that this could not possibly be true, but no other explanation for the deathly silence and stillness presented itself.

Xenophon, however, shuddering with cold, used his arms to sweep away a mound of snow from the bed of a cart almost invisible under its deep blanket. Then clambering onto it, he took a deep breath, and to my amazement began bellowing into the frozen air, sending a flock of crows frantically flapping and cackling into the sky from the trees where they had been silently observing us. He shouted curses into the stillness, commanding the forest to awaken, ordering the nymphs and the naiads to dress themselves and split him some firewood, calling, as if he had taken leave of his senses, invoking I know not whom-Pan and the satyrs and the other forest gods perhaps-to stand up and praise their Maker for their continued existence, offering a goat for breakfast to anyone who could find one still living under the snow. I watched in wonder as he declaimed to the stillness, exhorting the rocks and the hills, and then I watched in even greater amazement as the rocks and hills answered him in reply.